12
votes
Developer Resume Review
I am currently a junior in college and in search of summer internship for next year. I am not seeing much response and starting to wonder if it is an issue with my resume. Is there any chance one of you would be willing to take a look at it? Open to any and all feedback.
Thank you for your time.
I think it's good overall, some minor suggestions:
I generally despise "Objective" sections at the top of the resume, but one of the few times I think they're useful is for something like "looking for an internship in Summer 2021 and hopefully a full-time position starting in June 2022".
Skills section - you could group "Linux: Ubuntu / Debian" in with the "Systems" line (you've done a good job keeping it to a single page, if you expand other sections as I think you should, you'll want to trim places like this to avoid a second page with only a few lines)
Education - list your expected graduation date. Also your GPA unless it's low, and a list of the more interesting courses you took.
Professional Experience - unless it's a very secretive startup you were working for, add some details about what the purpose of that REST API project was / what problem you were trying to solve. When I interview junior engineers this is one of the things I look for, an understanding of not just "here's a technical thing I did" but "here's a problem we had, and here's the technical thing and here's how that worked towards solving the overall problem".
For example, ~15 years ago, I worked for my college's tech support helpdesk, and I wrote a Windows service in C# that ran on every computer in the computer labs. It had a front-end that used PHP and MySQL.
Those are interesting technical details, but nothing about what the actual problem was. Compare that to:
Our computer labs were often full, especially around midterms / finals, so students would have to go from lab to lab searching for an empty seat. I wrote a Windows service that ran on every lab computer, checked once a minute if someone was logged in and phoned home to a central server (sending only the hostname and a boolean, not the username or any other identifying data). The central server wrote those results to a MySQL database, then a PHP frontend queried the database and showed which labs had available seats. That frontend was displayed on TVs throughout campus and finding an open seat became much easier.
And as a side bonus, we realized that could also use that internally to detect lab computers that were broken - if it stops reporting entirely it may be turned off or unplugged from the network. If it's reporting once a minute like normal, but no one has logged in to it in a long time, it might have a broken monitor/mouse/keyboard, or have lost its connection with the domain controller (annoyingly common) causing every login attempt to fail.
Other experience: add some details about your undergrad research. Not everyone does research as an undergrad, so that's an opportunity for you to stand out, but it ends up being easy to miss because all the other experience entries have bullet points and this one doesn't.
"2020 - Present" is confusing when it's still 2020, add the month you started or something. "Sophomore Year - 2019" is also confusing. Just list month & year start & end, like the Stanford entry. It makes it clear whether you worked on something an entire year or just a few months / one semester.
"Twitter clone for final project" is a bit confusing when you haven't graduated yet. Was it a final project just for a class?
For both the Twitter clone and FidoLease, you could collapse the first two bullet points (backend built using foo, frontend built using bar). Not necessary, but again useful if you find yourself just over a page and want to trim vertical space.
Another thing to consider is that lots of companies are probably still evaluating what they want their internship programs to look like next year. 100% WFH has been hard enough on us full-time employees, I shudder at the thought of trying to onboard a cohort of summer interns under these conditions. So you may want to pursue non-traditional internships like Google Summer of Code or with companies like Gitlab that were 100% remote pre-covid and have a more established process for onboarding junior people remotely.
+1 for this. I did the MLH Fellowship this summer and it was a lifesaver for me.
tl;dr The resume basically tells me "I worked with this thing" over and over. That could be anyone! I want to know so much more about you and your personality and your experiences and your transferable skills! You can condense a lot and use the remaining space to tell a story that makes you stand out.
No problem! It takes a lot of time and iteration. After every revision you think, "aha! my resume looks so much better now! i can't believe it looked the way it used to, what was i thinking!" only to look at it again a few months later and say the exact same thing after more tweaking.
It's very much a "you don't know what you don't know" sort of thing. It gets easier as you gain more nuggets of wisdom and experience... your perspective gradually shifts from student to employee, and you begin to better understand what people in your industry find valuable. Once you're able to get into the head of the person hiring you, it becomes a lot easier to communicate to them on their level. Know your audience, etc.
I don't see anything strictly wrong, but you could consider including a list of courses you've taken, since coursework is relevant experience and would give a bit more about your background than you currently appear to. Otherwise maybe fix the "Sophomore Year" date entry and rework the various bolded project names/descriptions into a more cohesive set of titles.
Edit: Also be aware that it's a tough market right now, especially for internships.